‘The stakes are really high here’: Spokane Public Schools bans cellphone use in class

Students, bid farewell to scrolling Tiktok in trigonometry, quit Snapchatting in social studies – and you can forget about posting to your Instagram story in intermediate ceramics.

Spokane Public Schools will next school year restrict cellphone use in its schools in a sweeping move meant to engage its 29,000 students more with their academics and their peers.

“We’ve never had an adversary to compete with the attention of kids like we’ve had with technology,” Superintendent Adam Swinyard said. “They are so incredibly addictive. They are so incredibly stimulating. Kids can infinitely be engaged on a device in their home or at school; we’ve never had to compete for the attention of our children like that before.”

To conquer the distracting foe, the district is revising its policy around cellphones, banning their use in middle and elementary schools during school hours and in high schools except during lunch and between classes.

While much of the discussion surrounds restricting cellphone use, the policy applies to all “mobile devices,” including smartwatches, video game consoles, tablets and anything else that sends messages or plays video. This excludes school-issued laptops and medical listening devices, and instances where technology is required to fulfill some students’ individual education plans.

Headphones and earbuds are also restricted, except when directed by a teacher. Students of all grades often watch videos or other audio content on their Chromebooks, and they’ll still be permitted to use headphones to do so.

The first few times a student is caught using their device in violation of the policy, staff will remind the student of the ban and urge them to put their phone away.

After “consistent reminders of the rules,” staff would confiscate the device, returning it to the student at the end of the day. Enough of that, and schools would call home.

“If that becomes excessive, and we’re talking to the same kid every day and every day, we’re having to take the device and return it, then we’ll make sure we’re folding in the parents,” Swinyard said.

There is discretion provided to educators in policing the restriction. There’s no set number of policy violations before confiscation and no set confiscations before parental notification. That’s intentional, Swinyard said, to allow for educators to react appropriately depending on the situation.

“It’s always important to have freedom within structure,” Swinyard said. “We want to be doing the most logical thing possible while having consistency across our schools, so we recognize there’s unique context, and so it’s important that our policies and procedures apply for that when necessary.”

During emergencies, students will have access to their phones. If someone needs to reach a student during school hours, Swinyard said they can call the front office and reach their student in the same way families did pre-cellphones.

When they banned cellphones during school hours, Salk Middle School staff found a “marked change” in the behavior of their students in discipline, engagement with each other and with their academics.

School board President Nikki Otero Lockwood said she’s heard from teachers who support the policy.

“The board has received emails from educators in our district asking for this change, specifically because of the student engagement and the distraction.”

Swinyard compared the restriction to the popularization of bike helmets for safety.

Spokane is on the leading edge of cellphone bans, though not alone. The Legislature last session considered a bipartisan bill to mandate districts tighten their policies in the future, but the bill stalled in the short session.

The 740-student Reardan-Edwall School District last year restricted use, as did Peninsula School District on the West Side and some central Washington schools.

“You’re seeing an evolution in how schools are thinking about it, because we’re recognizing the risks and we’re recognizing the impact with the intent of keeping our kids as safe as possible,” Swinyard said. “I will say the stakes are really high here, and the impact to our kids is vast and deep, and maybe a way that we haven’t seen across other topics in maybe quite some time.”

Swinyard and Lockwood acknowledged that the policy will take some getting used to from students in following it and staff in enforcing it. They’re hoping to educate students on their motivations to ban phones to prevent a “million little power struggles” as educators police the devices .

While students and staff both will have to adjust to the stark policy change, an increasingly engaged student body is expected to make the transition worthwhile, with lasting effects on the students themselves and the school system as a whole.

“I hope we have figured out the mental health impacts to this, and we adjust as needed to what we need as a community, and that we have healthy boundaries with social media and technology use,” Lockwood said. “So the next set of kids coming in 10 years, we’ll already have that established.”